Lowry, DeRozan lead Raptors as they stun Cavs again
TORONTO — Toronto Raptors coach Dwane Casey’s belief in his team has been admirable, even when others doubted him.
"Everybody can bury us and put us under, but we’re not quitting," Casey said after Toronto lost the first two games of the Eastern Conference finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers by a combined 50 points.
He was irritated about talk of a Cleveland sweep.
When Toronto won Game 3 and the victory felt like just a blip on Cleveland’s path to a series win in five games, Casey said, "We’re not in this just to win one game, to not just get swept. We’re in this to win."
Do you believe him now?
The Raptors tied the series at 2-2 with a 105-99 victory against Cleveland on Monday, and what once looked like an easy series for the Cavaliers on their way to the NBA Finals has turned into a tight contest.
"It's one game," Casey said. "I know that sounds simplistic, but it's one game in a seven-game series. We're in it," Casey said. ", I still say that we're a young, up-and-coming team that's got to stay hungry, got to stay humble, and continue to compete with poise, because again, nobody thought we were going to be here."
Toronto lost an 18-point third quarter lead, regained the lead late in the fourth and got two offensive rebounds with less than two minutes to play that resulted in four big points — two for Kyle Lowry and two for DeMar DeRozan, the stars of the game.
The Raptors’ playoff truism played out: If All-Stars Lowry and DeRozan play well, the Raptors play well. Lowry had 35 points, five assists and five rebounds, and DeRozan scored 32 points. They were a combined 28-of-43 from the field.
"It's a cake walk for me once he gets going," DeRozan said. "It opens up everything for me on the floor. Teams try to focus in on him, and he knows when to get me going. He got the ball, he's our point guard, he's our leader of this team and he knows how to orchestrate what needs to be done out there."
Credit Toronto’s defensive adjustments, too, doing what Detroit and Atlanta were unable to do: protect the paint and limit Cleveland’s three-pointers. Now, the Raptors are exposing the Cavaliers’ issues. When Cleveland isn’t making threes, it has trouble creating the scoring opportunities it did in the first two rounds.
"We figured out ways to try to protect the paint," Casey said. "This team is a great scoring team, and so I think that you've got to have a balance of what you want to take away. You've got to pick your poison. We had a better balance, more than just taking one thing away or two things away. I think we got a balance of what we were going to work with."
Raptors finally get good game from Lowry, DeRozan
The Cavaliers shot 47% from the field, but just 31.7% on three-pointers. The three-ball that went through the hoop with record-breaking regularity against Atlanta has abandoned the Cavs in this series, shooting worse than 35% in the two losses at Toronto.
Kevin Love struggled again offensively. After going 1-of-9 in Game 3, Love scored 10 points on 4-of-14 shooting from the field. LeBron James (29 points) and Kyrie Irving (26 points) carried a majority of the offense and didn’t get enough help.
"I definitely thought we had finally got over the curve of how we wanted to play here in this building," James said. "But you've still got to get stops, and they did a great job of just making shot after shot after shot, even when our run was happening."
Know what else Casey said earlier in the series? "What’s the old saying? The series doesn’t start until you lose at home?"
The series is now a best-of-three, and if the Raptors want to win the series, they need to win a game on the road. Game 5 is Wednesday (8:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) in Cleveland.
Follow Jeff Zillgitt on Twitter @JeffZillgitt.